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Apple Releases Bonjour for Windows 1.0.3
MacDailyNews is reporting that Apple has released Bonjour for Windows 1.0.3. From the article: "Bonjour, also known as zero-configuration networking, enables automatic discovery of computers, devices, and services on IP networks. Bonjour uses industry standard IP protocols to allow devices to automatically discover each other without the need to enter IP addresses or configure DNS servers."
I didn't know anyone still used Windows 1.0
I've already said Bonjour to Windows...
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
My mac finds network printers with no delay at all and gets the appropriate drivers as needed (the Windows equivalent has sucked ever since they introduced it and it's specific to printers).
My co-workers' iTunes libraries show up instantly for me to play on my own mac.
iChat with no central server
There are others, but the point is that they all work over the same protocol. No specific network programming is required as long as a device is Bonjour-enabled. It's not the greatest thing since sliced bread but it makes networking easier. With Windows Microsoft prefers to program each device type separately.
Developers: We can use your help.
The dogcow says "Moof!"
There's a difference between computers and services in a distributed environment (network). DHCP operates at a lower level to get individual computers into the environment with an addressable endpoint (IP address). Computer names provide a poor form of 'fixed' DNS for addressing of packets inside the environment from one machine to the other, commonly used for such things as file sharing when you know you need to connect to the named file server and a particular share on it.
Services, on the other hand, could exist on any of the computers and Bonjour (formerly Rendezvous) and other service discovery protocols (such as used in Jini) work at this level, looking for particular services without a care of what computer on which they run, or if they changed from one computer to another because that computer got taken offline and replaced by another one. Services could include an iTunes broadcast stream, an iChat presence, or a service that, when called via a program, can return the expected weight of x pairs of jeans, for a totally inane example.
In the iChat example, if you had a coworker moving between machines, you wouldn't know which one to message just by computer name (such as that Messaging Service that Windows NT has where you can send a message to another machine by machine name and it comes up in a dialog window). With Bonjour, wherever your coworker logged in, your iChat would find his identity as a service and know to route your iChats messages to him at his current machine.
And frankly, the windows equivalent is pretty easy. Just type "\\servername\printername" and the print queue is opened & the drivers are installed for you from the print server if you don't have them. You can quietly put it in the login script with "rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /c\\servername /n\\servername\printername /q". You can also set the default printer with the /y switch.
Yes, that's much easier than choosing the printer you want from a list of those available to you.
It is completely different. Wireless Zero Configuration on Windows is a serviced used to connect your machine to 802.11 wireless networks, and (apparantly) to 802.1X network authorization systems.
Bonjour is a completely different animal, that is more of a combination of a decentralized DNS, and a way for machines to say "hey, heere are the services I offer that you can use" to any other machines on the network. Each machine running a full Bonjour/ZeroConf installation will advertise its name on the network, and the network services it provides. A system might, for example, advertise that it offers SSH, HTTP, FTP, AFP, Samba, and printing services. A client machine running Bonjour/ZeroConf that connects to this network will automatically know about these other services on the network, and can thus offer them as connection options to the user as is approperiate.
For example, say you take your laptop to the airport. You open it up, and get a wireless connection through Windows as usual. You fire up your web browser, and in a special bookmark menu you automatically see the links for arrivals, departures, and general airport information.
Or you walk into an office you are visiting, and need to print off a document. You open up the document, select Print, and find in the print dialog that your system has already found all available printers on your subnet.
You hit the cafe, and decide to fire up your favorite music application to listen to some tunes. Other people are there doing the same thing, and your system finds their playlists, and lets you browser through them and play them on your own laptop.
These are the sorts of things that Bonjour/ZeroConf permit. It's like a distributed DNS, where each machine only needs to know about itself, and the resolution database gets built dynamically. But it goes one step further to describe not just the hosts, but the public services those hosts offer.
I run Bonjour a lot on my networks. I do have a few Macs, but most of the systems I'm running it on are Linux systems. A client that connects to my personal network (something which is of course restricted by both WPA2 and a MAC filter list) will learn about all of the services they have public access to, including a few print gateways, digital audio streaming services, network sharing services, multimedia sharing services, chat services, and a variety of others. Suitably enabled client applications will know about these systems automatically, and can then build the relevent on screen menus or selection dialogs or whatnot to permit connecting to these services. And for a significantly large network size, it is significantly easier for an administrator to configure one printer to use Bonjour/ZeroConf than it is to have to tell potentially hundreds of clients where the printer is on the network.
Yaz.
And it works.
But only 30 hours per week.
I keed, I keed...